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Duplicate Content

My website is hosted by Hubspot. With each blog I write I can tag them to be listed in a specific category. As an example, one blog article my have three tags or categories that it fits in. Seomoz is seeing this as a duplication of content. in other words, if you go to the different category pages the same article would be listed on all three pages, even though it is just one article. However, I only have 36 duplicate content warnings and I have 150 blog articles, each having 2 or 3 tags (categories.), so there should be many more than 36 duplications.

Is this something that affects my seo, or should I just ignore the problem and check these warnings as fixed?

2 Responses

For the most part, tags in blog only have value in that they group together posts on similar topics. You should try to stay away from giving any post a one-off tag where they wind up being the only post ever to sit on that tag archive page. Because your site shows full articles instead of snippets, a blog post and any one-off tag archive page it appears on would be duplicates of each other. Other tag archives with varied posts would not be straight duplicates of any specific post. Normally people NoIndex their tag archives to avoid duplicate content issues.

It's more of a warning than a real problem, but it is possible that search engines will see the pages and consider them duplicate content. It's possible that one of those pages won't be indexed.

I've come across this problem before writing for my own blog. I was writing some tips for Apache and .htaccess and found that every post I wrote was tagged to both categories, so the category pages were being flagged as duplicate content. I remedied this by consciously writing a post that only fit into one category, and the warning was removed from my Moz campaign report.

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